add support for GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT

[toxeus]

For background see here and here. Therefore, golint will blindly check vendored dependencies when GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1. Since we cannot expect all dependencies to be golint compliant the vendor folder should be ignored by golint when GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1.

[dsymonds]

I'm not sure ignoring is right. The go tool doesn't ignore vendored packages if you use it with a ./... argument; why should golint?

[toxeus]

why should golint?

I think that it's pretty sane to assume that your dependencies should not fail on go build and go test and therefore not ignore the dependencies when specifying ./... for the go tool.

For golint it's a different story because - as of now - most go packages are not golint compliant. IMHO it would be the wrong thing to punish a project that tries to be golint compliant by making it work around the dependencies' golint errors.

Alternatively, a -ignore flag could be provided. But is certainly much less convenient.

[brocaar]

@adg proposed to use this workaround for the go tool (golang/go#11659):

go install $(go list ./... | grep -v /vendor/)

Maybe we could make this work for the golint tool too (golint $(go list ./... |grep -v /vendor/))?
It seems that now the golint tool parses the arguments provided by go list ./... as files and thus resulting in the error no such file or directory for each package.

My current workaround (in a Makefile) is:

test:
    for pkg in $$(go list ./... |grep -v /vendor/) ; do \
        golint $$pkg ; \
    done

    # other tests

[ascarter]

In my opinion, the go tool should be ignoring vendor - to me this code should be exactly like library code in your workspace, just in the vendor/. I think vendor is a snapshot that most people would want to leave untouched. If you did want to locally fork in vendor, explicitly providing vendor/path/to/thing seems perfectly fine. I'm betting the 90% case is like what @toxeus, @brocaar, and I are experiencing.

Adding ignore option would be an ok workaround. @brocaar - thanks for the workaround - that unblocks our CI for the time being.

[ifraixedes]

I agree with @ascarter
Many thanks @brocaar for the workaround

[dsymonds]

golang/go#12278 is probably going to be the right solution. Every tool that operates on Go packages shouldn't hack in their own mechanism for handling vendored packages.

[fiorix]

@brocaar you can do that with a one-liner: go list ./... | grep -v /vendor/ | xargs -L1 cmd where cmd is golint or whatever.

[paddycarver]

Just wanted to chime in that this is currently kind of non-obvious, and a workaround being documented better (or supporting the same workaround used for the go command) would be a great step forward, in my opinion. I have some thoughts about how to add support in a non-breaking-change way, but none are particularly elegant (add it as a flag option, allow multiple package paths to be passed, etc.) I'd be happy to take a crack at it, if it's a desirable change.

[dsymonds]

GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT support is not going to happen because that env var is going away. It was a transitional hack.

golint isn't going to intentionally skip vendor dirs for the same reason that the go tool doesn't. There' easy workarounds as are listed above.

The only remaining piece is to make sure that vendored imports are actually type checked correctly, and that only requires switching golint to using the go/types package in the standard library. I'll be doing that shortly.

[nathany]

It would be very nice if golint $(go list ./... | grep -v vendor) worked for consistency between go tools -- such as when creating a Makefile. As mentioned in #151 (comment), golint doesn't like a list of packages.

open github.com/org/repo: no such file or directory
open github.com/org/repo/pkg: no such file or directory

[toxeus]

@dsymonds wrote:

golint isn't going to intentionally skip vendor dirs for the same reason that the go tool doesn't. There' easy workarounds as are listed above.

With the release of Go 1.9 the go tool is intentionally skipping vendor dirs. See the release notes and the discussion on github. I suggest that for the same reason golint should also intentionally skip vendor dirs.

[nathany]

see #320 as this issue is closed